What do you do when your 1975 to 1978 Mercury Marquis just isn’t big enough to haul all the kids? You get out the cutting saw and put another row of seats in it!

A google search for “Mercury six door limo” yields a lot of oddities, even a stretched AMC Ambassador wagon, but nothing about any Marquis like this. Even variations of this search revealed nothing, so if you know anything about the history of such a Mercury, please speak up.

This was off in the corner of a salvage yard I drove by, leading me to suspect it isn’t being squashed–for the time being. The two drag lines in the background were quite busy at the time I saw this.

Yes, I like big Ford’s and Mercury’s of this vintage, but this puppy would be hard to park in most garages and would need forty acres to turn around. A CC on a normal Marquis of this vintage can be found here.

Wow. I do know that Armbruster Stageway used to do stretch Lincolns in this era. I worked for a place that had two of them, a 78 and a 79 IIRC, both 6 door sedans.

However, as I recall them, the coachbuilder did a much more elegant job on the roofline than is evident on this Mercury. The dents and multiple colors doesn’t help here, but that roof looks sort of cobbled together rather than really designed. Every Stageway or A-S stretch I have ever seen does a much nicer job on the roof than is on this car, making me suspect that someone else built this one.

In fact, that Marquis has been abandoned in that very spot since 1976. Private detective Frank Cannon chased it to that location, until it became bogged down in the sand. Anthony James was the limo driver and John Colicos was the villain riding in the back. Cannon apprehended them as they tried to escape by climbing that chain link fence in the foreground.

I saw something very similar to this in my local Pick-A-Part several years back. It was stretched like the one above, painted bright red with a white interior. The roof had been neatly and expertly sawed off.

Many years ago, like ~20 or so, GM stretch limo that did airport duty in my area, I’d see it on the freeway fairly frequently on its way to or from SeaTac. It was a typical style stretch w/o an extra pair of doors.